Gmail, Google's free webmail offering, is now encrypted by default as a guard against hackers, the company has announced on its Gmail blog. As the company explains, "Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public Wi-Fi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do."

Of course, it also has the effect of making it very much harder for people who want to break into Gmail accounts – say, government-sponsored hackers of a very large country – to do so. (A properly configured https system should be proof against man-in-the-middle attacks – although, as a security researcher showed last February, the problem is to get users to realise when they're being targeted.

Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists were targeted by Chinese hackers – almost certainly with the approval of the Chinese government – though Google said that only certain details about the accounts, such as the subject lines of emails and the date when the accounts were created, were compromised. Other attacks in which Gmail accounts were broken into occurred when the users' computers had "malware" secretly installed on them to steal passwords and other login details.